The Misses Mallett (The Bridge Dividing) Part 3

-- 2

The outward life of the Mallett household was elegant and ordered.

Footsteps fell quietly on the carpeted stairs and pa.s.sages; doors were quietly opened and closed. The cook and the parlourmaid were old and trusted servants; the house and kitchen maids were respectable young women fitting themselves for promotion, and their service was given with the thoroughness and deference to which the Malletts were accustomed. In the whole house there was hardly an object without beauty or tradition, the notable exception being the portrait of General Mallett which hung above the Sheraton sideboard in the dining-room, a gloomy daub, honoured for the General's sake.

From the white panelled hall, the staircase with its white banisters and smooth mahogany rail led to a square landing which branched off narrowly on two sides, and opening from the square were the bedroom occupied by Rose, the one shared by her stepsisters and the one which had been Reginald's. This room was never used, but it was kept, like everything else in that house, in a state of cleanliness and polish, ready for his arrival. He might come: if he needed money badly enough he would come, and in spite of the already considerable depletion of their capital, Caroline and Sophia lived in hope of hearing his impatient a.s.sault of the door-knocker, the bra.s.s head of a lion holding a heavy ring in his mouth. Rose, too, wished he would come, but that last interview with the lawyer Batty had been more successful than anyone but the lawyer himself had wished, and there was no knock, no letter, no news.

The usual life of parties, calls and concerts continued without any excitement but that felt by Caroline and Sophia in the getting of new clothes, the refurbis.h.i.+ng of old ones, the hearing of the latest gossip, the reading of the latest novel. Sophia sometimes apologized for the paper-backed books lying about the drawing-room by saying that she and dear Caroline liked to keep up their French, but Caroline loudly proclaimed her taste for salacious literature. She had a reputation to keep up and she liked to shock her friends; but everything was forgiven to Miss Mallett, the more readily, perhaps, after Sophia's rea.s.suring whisper, 'They are really charming books, quite beautiful, nothing anybody could disapprove of. Why, there is hardly an episode to make one shrink, though, of course, the French are different,' and the Radstowe ladies would nod over their tea and say, 'Of course, quite different!'

But Caroline, suspecting that murmured explanation, had been known to call out in her harsh voice, 'It's no good asking Sophia about them.

She simply doesn't understand the best bits! She is _jeune fille_ still, she always will be!' Sophia, blus.h.i.+ng a little, would feel herself richly complimented, and the ladies laughed, Mrs. Batty uncertainly, having no acquaintance with the French language.

Rose read steadily through all the books in the house and gained a various knowledge which left her curiously untouched. She studied music, and liked it better than anything else because it roused emotions otherwise un.o.btainable, yet she did not care much for the emotional kind. Perhaps her intensest feeling was the desire to feel intensely, but being half ashamed of this desire she rarely dwelt on it; she pursued her way, calm and aloof and proud. She was beautiful and found pleasure in the contemplation of herself, and though she did not discuss her appearance as her stepsisters discussed theirs, she spent a good deal of time on it and much money on her plain but perfect clothes. All three had more money than they needed, but Rose was richer than the others, having inherited her mother's little fortune as well as her share of what the General had left. She was, as Caroline often told her with a hit at that gentleman's unnecessary impartiality, a very desirable match. 'But they're afraid of you, my dear; they were afraid of me, but I amused them, while you simply look as if they were not there. Of course, that's attractive in its way, and one must follow one's own line, but it takes a brave man to come up to the scratch.'

'Caroline, what an expression!'

'Well, I want a brave man,' Rose said, 'if I want one at all.'

Caroline turned on Sophia. 'What's language for except to express oneself? You're out of date, Sophia; you always were, and I've always been ahead of my time. Now, Rose,'--these personalities were dear to Caroline--'Rose belongs to no time at all. That frightens them. They don't understand. You can't imagine a Radstowe young man making love to the Sphinx. They were more daring when I was young. Look at Reginald! Look at the General!'

'It was his profession,' Rose remarked.

'Yes, I suppose that's what he told himself when he married your mother, a mere girl, no older than myself, but he was afraid of her and adored her. I believe men always like their second wives best-- they're flattered at succeeding in getting two. I know men. Our own mother was pious and made him go to church, but with your mother he looked as if he were in a temple all the time. Those big, stern men are always managed by their women; it's the thin men with weak legs who really go their own way.'

'Caroline,' Sophia sighed, 'I don't know how you think of such things.

Is that an epigram?'

'I don't know,' Caroline said, 'but I shouldn't be surprised.'

Smiling in her mysterious way, Rose left the room, and Sophia, slightly pink with anxiety, murmured, 'Caroline, there's no one in Radstowe really fit for her. Don't you think we ought to go about, perhaps to London, or abroad?'

'I'm not going to budge,' Caroline said. 'I love my home and I don't believe in matchmaking, I don't believe in marriage. It wouldn't do her any good, but if you feel like that, why don't you exploit her yourself?'

'Oh--exploit! Certainly not! And you know I couldn't leave you.'

'Then don't talk nonsense,' Caroline said, and the life at Nelson Lodge went on as before.

Every day Rose rode out, sometimes early in the morning on the Downs when n.o.body was about and she had them to herself, but oftener across the bridge into the other county where the atmosphere and the look of things were immediately different, softer, more subtle yet more exhilarating. She went there now with no fear of meeting Francis Sales. He had gone to Canada without another word, and his absence made him interesting for the first time. If she had not been bored in a delicate way of her own which left no mark but an expression of impa.s.sivity she would not have thought of him at all; but the days went by and summer pa.s.sed into autumn and autumn was threatened by winter, with so little change beyond the coming and going of flowers and leaves and birds, that her mind began to fix itself on a man who loved her to the point of disgust and departure; and to her love of the country round about Sales Hall was added a tender half-ironic sentiment.

Once or twice she rode up to the Hall itself and paid a visit to Mr.

Sales who, crippled by rheumatism and half suffocated by asthma, was hardly recognizable as the man who had shown her the pigs long ago. In the little room called the study, where there was not a single book, or in the big clear drawing-room of pale chintzes and faded, gilt-framed water-colours, he entertained her with the ceremony due to a very beautiful and dignified young woman, producing the latest letter from his son and reading extracts from it. Sometimes there was a photograph of Francis on a horse, Francis with a dog, or Francis at a steam plough or other agricultural machine, but these she only pretended to examine. She had not the least desire to see how he looked, for in these last months she had made a picture of her own and she would not have it overlaid by any other. It was a game of pretence; she knew she was wasting her time; she had her youth and strength and money and limitless opportunity for wide experience, but her very youth, and the feeling that it would last for ever, made her careless of it. There was plenty of time, she could afford to waste it, and gradually that occupation became a habit, almost an absorption. She warned herself that she must shake it off, but the effort would leave her very bare, it would rob her of the fairy cloak which made her inner self invisible, and she clung to it, secure in her ability to be rid of it if she chose.

Her intellect made no mistake about Francis Sales, but her imagination, finding occupation where it could, began to endow him with romance, and that scene among the primroses, the startlingly green gra.s.s, the pervading blue of the air, the horse so indifferent to the human drama, the dog trying to understand it, became the salient event of her life because it had awakened her capacity for dreaming.

She did not love him, she could never love him, but he had loved her, angrily, and, in retrospect, the absurd manner of his proposal had a charm. She would have given much to know whether his feeling for her persisted. From the letters read wheezily by Mr. Sales and sometimes handed to her to read for herself, she learnt so little that she was the freer to create a great deal and, riding home, she would break into astonished inward laughter. Rose Mallett playing a game of sentiment! And, crossing the bridge and pa.s.sing through the streets where she was known to every second person, she had pleasure in the conviction that no one could have guessed what absurdity went on behind the pale, impa.s.sive face, what secret and unsuspected amus.e.m.e.nt she enjoyed; a little comedy of her own! The unsuitability of Francis Sales for the part of hero supplied most of the humour and saved her from loss of dignity. The thing was obviously absurd; she had never cared for dolls, but in her young womanhood she was finding amus.e.m.e.nt in the manipulation of a puppet.

The death of Mr. Sales in the cold March of the next year shocked her from her game. She was sorry he had gone, for she had always liked him, and he seemed to have taken with him the little girl who was fond of pigs, and while Caroline and Sophia mourned the loss of an old friend, Rose was faced with the certainty of his son's return. She would have to stop her ridiculous imaginings, she must pretend she had never had them for, when she saw him as flesh and blood, her game would be ruined and she would be shamed. The imminence of his arrival reminded her of his dullness, his handsome, sullen face and, more tenderly, of those tears which had put her so oddly in his debt. But she had no difficulty in casting away the false image she had made.

She was, she found, glad to be rid of it; she liked to feel herself delivered of a weakness.

But she need not have been in such a hurry, for it was some months before the man who brought the milk from Sales Hall also brought the news that the master was returning. This information was handed to Caroline and Sophia with their early tea.

Sitting up in bed and looking grotesquely terrible, they discussed the event. Caroline, like Medusa, but with hair curlers instead of snakes sprouting from her head, and Sophia with her heavy plait hanging over her shoulder and defying with its luxuriance the yellowness of her skin, they sat side by side, propped up with pillows, inured to the sight of each other in undress.

'He has come back!' Sophia said ecstatically. 'Perhaps after all--'

'Oh, nonsense!' Caroline said as usual, 'she's meant for better things. My dear, she was born for a great affair. She ought to be the mistress of a king. Yes, something of that kind, with her looks, her phlegm.'

'But there are no kings in Radstowe,' Sophia said, 'and I don't think you ought to say such things.'

'It's my way. You ought to know that. And I can't control my tongue any more than Reginald can control his body.'

'Caroline!'

'And I don't want to. We're all wrapped up in cotton-wool nowadays. I ought to have lived in another century. I, too, would have adorned a court, and kept it lively! There's no wit left in the world, and there's no wickedness of the right kind. We might as well be Nonconformists at once.'

'Certainly not,' Sophia said firmly. 'Certainly not that.'

'But as you so cleverly remind me, there are no kings in Radstowe.

There's not even,' she added with a mocking smile which made her face gay in a ghastly way, 'not even a foreign Count who would turn out an impostor. Rose would do very well there, too. An imitation foreign Count with a black moustache and no money! She would be magnificent and tragic. Imagine them at Monte Carlo, keeping it up! She would hate him, grandly; she would hate herself for being deceived; she would never lose her dignity. You can't picture Rose with a droop or a tear.

They'd trail about the Continent and she would never come back.'

'But we don't want her to go away at all,' Sophia cried.

'And when she came to the point of being afraid of murdering him, she would leave him without any fuss and live alone and mysterious somewhere in the South of France, or Italy, or Spain. Yes, Spain.

There must be real Counts there and she would get her love affair at last.'

'But she would still be married.'

'Of course!' Caroline, looking roguish, was terrible. 'That is necessary for a love affair, _ma chere_.'

'I would much rather she married Francis Sales and came to see us every week. Or any other nice young man in Radstowe. She would never marry beneath her.'

'On the contrary,' Caroline remarked, 'she's bound to marry beneath her--not in cla.s.s, Sophia, not in cla.s.s, though in Radstowe that's possible, too. Look at the Battys! But certainly in brains and manners.'

Sophia, clinging to her own idea, repeated plaintively, 'I would rather it were Francis Sales, and he must be lonely in that big house.'

It appeared, however, that he was not to be lonely, for Susan, entering with hot water, let fall in her discreet, impersonal way, another piece of gossip. 'John Gibbs says they think Mr. Francis must be bringing home a wife, Miss Caroline. He's having some of the rooms done up.'

'Ah!' said Caroline, and her plump elbow pressed Sophia's. 'Which rooms, I wonder?'

'I did not inquire, Miss Caroline.'

'Then kindly inquire this afternoon, and tell him the b.u.t.ter is deteriorating, but inquire first or you'll get nothing out of him.'

She turned with malicious triumph to Sophia. 'So that dream's over!'

'We shall have to break it to her gently,' Sophia said; 'but it may not be true.'

In the dining-room over which the General's portrait tried, and failed, to preside, as he himself had done in life, and where he was conquered by an earlier and a later generation, by the s.h.i.+ning eloquence of the old furniture and silver and the living flesh and blood of his children, Caroline gave Rose the news without, Sophia thought, a spark of delicacy.